Meditation Forest is an interactive installation allowing people to feel and create music by simple touch. It can create a playful but also meaningful music experience to those general visitors who do not have much knowledge about music and guitar history.

Design Process

Inspiration: Hindu Music

This artistic project has an unique start, in-depth interviews about personal music experience. This interviewee talks about his childhood memory, Hindu music. It is described as quiet and ambiguous, and noted as a form of meditation.

"It allows people to escape from the external life but also ends up with reflection and meditation"

Research: nature worship

To recreating this quiet, relaxing and mysterious music experience, I looked into Hinduism philosophy. One interesting finding, it is a religion that highly worship nature, and see nature as an co-exist system in which everything is just a flow of energy. Many other cultures and philosophies share the similar idea, such as Gaia philosophy.

In recent works, the concept is also popular, such as the Gaia planet in Asimov's sci-fi series Foundation and the Pandora planet in movie Avatar.

Inspiration: spiritual forest

The inspiration of this installation is from one overwhelming scene in Avatar, that the Tree of Souls can help human directly communicate with the nature.

Haptic Interaction

The concept is a forest of vines which has different timbres and rhythms. By touching different positions of the vine, user can create different pitches.

Low position touching – low pich

High position touching – high pitch

Prototype: Arduino + Processing

By connecting Nm 10/3 conductive yarn to Arduino pins supported by CapSense library, different capacitance signals can be picked up when touching different positions. The signals are then sent to Processing with Minum library to create sound waves of different pitch, scale and sound color.